Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Book Review - Sudden Storm: A Wendigo Reader (Larry Fessenden, 2015)

“The Wendigo is hungry, always hungry. And its hunger is never
satisfied. The more it eats the bigger it gets. And the bigger it gets, the
hungrier it gets. It can grow as tall as the trees, and still it aches with
hunger. And we are hopeless in the face of it. We are devoured.”

–Larry Fessenden, Wendigo (2001)

These
days, you don’t see many books about the Wendigo on the shelves in the bookstores.
Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be very many people who are willing to
tackle the enormous amount of lore
and material that is available about this horrifying beast. And trust me, there
is a lot of material to be had! Close
to a year ago, I heard about a book entitled Sudden Storm: A Wendigo Reader via the Internet. When I saw
this title, I immediately knew that I absolutely had to get ahold of a copy. Not having a whole lot of money with
which to order a copy for myself, I decided to contact the publisher,
Fiddleblack Publishing (through Twitter, of all things). I explained my situation
to them, and soon enough, I had a response! They actually agreed to send me a copy, free of charge! Who knew that Twitter
could be so useful? Anyway, I provided them with my mailing address, and I
waited. About a week later, I had the book. This review is LONG overdue, and I would like to offer Fiddleblack Publishing my
sincerest apologies for not having posted this review sooner. I’ve been through
a lot in the past year, and I hope that they can forgive me.

Sudden Storm: A Wendigo Reader is a collection of scholarly essays compiled by
writer and film director Larry Fessenden, who wrote and directed the movie Wendigo (2001), as well as directing the
movie The Last Winter (2006) and the “Skin
and Bones” episode for the short-lived TV anthology series Fear Itself (2008). He also collaborated with the scriptwriters for
the 2015 PS4 horror survival hit, Until
Dawn (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015). All of this and more he relays in his introduction to the book. He
also discusses how he was introduced to the monster as a child and how it
literally scared the SHIT out of him. He then recounts his obsession with it as
an adult and as a writer and a filmmaker, as well as his subsequent research
into the subject and how it continues to influence his work to this very day. Needless
to say, the Wendigo has, figuratively speaking, consumed him.

Sudden Storm: A Wendigo Reader is composed of seventeen scholarly essays, interviews,
stories, and script excerpts by a number of different writers, with each one
giving their own thoughts on the Wendigo. Each one of these shall be briefly
examined in this review, which is why it’ll be quite a bit longer than the
others. The first thing presented is a script excerpt from Mr. Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001), in which the young boy
Miles speaks to his father, George, about the Wendigo, after which they go
sledding in the snow. In the first essay, “Seeing Wendigos”, Victoria Nelson discusses
the monster in regards to literature, mainly concentrating on Algernon
Blackwood’s novella “The Wendigo” (1910). She also takes a look at E.M.
Forster’s 1920 tale, “The Story of the Siren”. While the latter story isn’t
actually about the Wendigo, Nelson
takes note of some interesting parallels between the two stories. Afterwards,
she touches upon Fessenden’s Wendigo,
and then draws upon “parallels” between the Wendigo and UFOs. The next entry,
“The Wendigo”, recounts a “goblin story” as told by former U.S. President Theodore
Roosevelt of a ferocious monster in the woods that a man named Bauman once encountered
and subsequently told Roosevelt about. Most people, however, regard this story
as being an early account of a very aggressive Sasquatch. The next essay, “The
Many Faces of the Wendigo: An Examination” by Chris Hibbard, is an in-depth
guide to the basics of what you need to know about the Wendigo. This is a fantastic essay, and the original
version (first published in 2008) can be read here. The
next essay is Carter Meland’s “It Consumes What It Forgets”. This essay is
about the Wendigo’s hunger and how it is unable to relate to or to feel any
sort of kinship with humans and the pain that it causes them because of that hunger.
It cannot love or feel anything other
than its unending hunger, and nothing else matters to the beast other than
killing and eating. In short, that hunger has caused the Wendigo to forget its
humanity, and therefore it consumes
what it has forgotten.

In
“Story of the Wendigo” by Sheldon Lee Compton, a very short story is given about a man who has been possessed by the
Wendigo and kills his starving family. Following this tragic tale is an excerpt
from the “Skin and Bones” script, as written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan.
The next essay is “Prophesy”, written by my good friend Nathan Carlson. Nathan
is the world’s foremost authority on
the Wendigo and the lore surrounding this horrible beast, and I trust him and
his research implicitly. In
“Prophesy”, Nathan speaks of how the white men destroyed a sacred manitohkan (effigy) in 1895 that kept
starvation and the Wendigo at bay. A shaman gave an ominous prophecy that the
Wendigo was coming, and the beast
would destroy everything and everyone who didn’t flee. This set into motion a
chain reaction that led to mass panic, famine, starvation, and fear, all of
which only hastened the Wendigo’s
coming. In 1896, a man named Felix Auger fell victim to the hunger himself, and
had to be executed. He was buried under a pile of heavy logs to keep him from
coming back as a full-fledged monster. Tragedy after tragedy followed, until
eventually the prophecy was forgotten…that is, until 2008. Nathan turned on the
TV early in the morning one night, and the Fear
Itself episode “Skin and Bones” was on. At the time, Nathan was writing the
very same essay featured in this
book. And when the show was over, the news immediately came on and shocked the world with the story of
Vincent Li, who murdered a young man named Tim McLean on July 30th aboard a Greyhound Bus. Li stabbed the young man to death with a large knife and
then hacked his head off with the blade and consumed some of his flesh. When Nathan heard
the news, he sank into “a fog of horror and revulsion”. You can actually feel Nathan’s pain as you read this
essay. However, I don’t want to give away the rest of the story. But needless
to say, Nathan was both horrified and
sickened by the similarities to the Wendigo and the sheer brutality of the act. The shaman’s prophecy has come true, and it
threatens to devour us all.

The
essay following Nathan Carlson’s “Prophesy” is an interview with filmmaker
Christian Tizya of Watson Street Pictures, conducted by Larry Fessenden
himself. This interview explores the mythology of the Wendigo, the murder
committed by Vince Li in 2008, native beliefs regarding the beast in modern
times, and Christian’s opinions regarding cinematic and literary portrayals of
the beast. The next essay, entitled “Pantheon” by Kim Newman, deals with the
monster’s portrayal in popular culture. This is mostly in regards to television
and the movies, but some literary material is examined. Some of those films
include Antonia Bird’s Ravenous
(1999), Larry Fessenden’s films Wendigo
(2001) and The Last Winter (2006), as
well as some brief mentions of other, lesser-known films. “Wendigo of the Week:
A Myth Too Big for the Small Screen?” by Samuel Zimmerman deals entirely with
the Wendigo as portrayed on television. The shows covered include Supernatural (S1/Ep01, “Wendigo”), The X-Files (S1/Ep19, “Shapes”), Sleepy Hollow (S2/Ep06, “And the Abyss
Gazes Back”), and Fear Itself – “Skin
and Bones”. Zimmerman takes the time to look at the deeper meanings behind the
creature’s portrayal in these TV shows, although his comments regarding the Supernatural episode “Wendigo” (which I
loved) are far from flattering. In
“Myth and Media Consumed”, Alison Natasia examines the “Wendigo Archetype” in
Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust
(1980) through the common denominator of the two: cannibalism (as the Wendigo
itself is never actually mentioned by
name in the film). And in the sixteen-page essay “Windigo Teaching: Cannibal
Critiques in ‘Ravenous’ and ‘Wendigo’”, Carter Meland dives deep into these two films. Here, Meland
summarizes the lore that surrounds the Wendigo for reference in conjunction
with the films. Next, he takes the time to summarize and dissect each film,
looking at the deeper meanings and taking care to note and discuss each
connection to the original Native American beliefs that he finds. He also
examines Joseph Boyden’s novel Three
Day Road (Penguin Books, 2006) in the same manner. Since this essay is
so long, I’ll move on to the next one to avoid any spoilers. Don’t worry,
because we’re almost done.

The
next essay in line is “Consumption, Chaos & Family Values”, written by
Bernice M. Murphy. In this thought-provoking essay, Bernice examines Stephen
King’s novel The Shining
(Doubleday Publishing, 1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the same name,
but with a twist: she looks at the
two works as stories of a man, Jack Torrance, who becomes possessed by the
Wendigo and slowly turns into a monster. It should be noted here that Jack’s
never-ending hunger isn’t for human flesh: it’s for alcohol. This too can be interpreted as a more modern variation on
the more traditional Wendigo’s hunger for human flesh, but the end result is always murderous violence (among the
many themes and parallels explored in this essay). Following this is an excerpt
from the script of The Last Winter
(2006), written by Larry Fessenden and Robert Leaver. And finally, the last
essay in the book is “The Last Winter: Why Wouldn’t Nature Fight Us?” by Bernice
M. Murphy. This final essay takes a deeper look at the themes found in the film
and their connections to the Wendigo. She presents the unseen force that
plagues the people as the Earth itself,
rising up against everything that mankind has done to it. It is interesting to
note that the Wendigo itself is seen as a force of nature, more specifically as
the personification of both winter and hunger. This is fascinating stuff, to put it
mildly. At the end of the book is a short afterword by Larry Fessenden, which
is followed by an annotated list of recommended reading.

Overall,
this book is well-written, neatly organized, and is both very educational and extremely entertaining. There are some spelling and grammar errors, but
this does not detract from the book’s
value as a thought-provoking, in-depth look at the Wendigo, the lore and
beliefs surrounding the beast, and the monster’s portrayal and its place in
popular culture. And in addition, the book features some truly amazing artwork that will both tantalize
and horrify you. All in all, I cannot recommend Sudden Storm enough, and I strongly urge my friends and this blog’s readers
to order a copy
for themselves as soon as possible. I
would also like to take this opportunity to thank Fiddleblack Publishing for sending
a free copy of this book to me, a guy that they don’t know and have never met,
and for giving me this great opportunity
to begin with, even though I took much
longer to read through this book and to get this review written, typed, and
posted than I should have. I hope that you guys at Fiddleblack can find the
kindness within your hearts to forgive me, as I have been through a lot in the
last year, and I hope that you very much enjoy this review! Thank You!!!

About Me

I'm 29 years old, have a brother and two sisters, and I am currently at work researching for a book.
If you have had an encounter of a supernatural or a paranormal nature, please email me at KPG1986@msn.com. Please give me details on the appearance, the location, the behavior (if any could be observed), and whether or not the creature behaved in a threatening manner towards you. I'm not an expert on these creatures, but I'll try to help in any way that I possibly can. And when I send you a response, please take the time to send an email back. Thank you!